Across the contributions, we find a common theme: None of our authors would say they have fully realized the community-first ethos, but striving towards this goal has resulted in personal, social, institutional, and epistemological transformations. Just as the process of throwing, glazing, and firing can transform clay into a beautiful mug like the one featured on the cover of this issue—created by our colleague Cathleen Kneen (1944-2016) —so too does striving to put community first reshape the way we work. This ethos challenges us and it is changing us, but in many ways, the journey to adopt community-first ways of working together has only just begun.

The content in this special issue was created in the context of the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE, pronounced “suffice”) partnership research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada beginning in 2012. Over the course of two project phases, CFICE’s overarching goal has been to enhance the partnership policies and practices of community-based organizations, postsecondary institutions, governments and funders to create more effective and valuable community-campus engagement. We define community-campus engagement to include community-engaged research, community service learning, and other ways that postsecondary institutions can have an impact in their communities, such as their potential as anchor institutions for local economies (Dragicevic, 2015).

We hope you enjoy this special issue of Engaged Scholar Journal. For CFICE participants, the transformative journey continues…

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This article shares some of the knowledge gained in Phase I of CFICE through on-the-ground research projects in the food sector. Check out the abstract below, or .

Abstract

This article is situated within nascent debates on the role of academics within food sovereignty movements. Drawing on insights from a collective autoethnography, we report on our experiences conducting three food sovereignty research projects in different contexts and at different scales. We suggest that that the principles and practices of food sovereignty translate into a food sovereignty research praxis. This consists of three pillars focusing on people (humanizing research relationships), power (equalizing power relations) and change (pursuing transformative orientations). This article discusses these pillars and analyzes the extent to which we were able to embody them within our projects.

Focusing on three Canadian inter-organizational networks that bring communities and universities together, Community Based Research Canada (CBRC), the Pacific Housing Research Network (PHRN) and the Indigenous Child Well-being Research Network, this paper identifies key criteria for assessing these networks’ outcomes and highlights factors that contribute to these networks’ challenges and successes.

Abstract

Inter-organizational networks are proliferating as a tool for community-university engagement (CUE). Focusing on three Canadian inter-organizational networks that bring communities and universities together, Community Based Research Canada (CBRC), the Pacific Housing Research Network (PHRN) and the Indigenous Child Well-being Research Network, this paper identifies key criteria for assessing these networks’ outcomes and highlights factors that contribute to these networks’ challenges and successes. This work is art of a growing body of scholarship seeking to better understand the role and contribution of networks in society and more specifically how the outcomes of these engagements might benefit and enhance collaborative research partnerships between civil society and higher education institutions. The results illuminate lessons learned from each of these three networks and their members. These findings inform broader research into community-university engagement networks and illustrate how these types of engagements can help build a stronger knowledge democracy in Canada and elsewhere.

Terry Mitchell, Colleen Loomis, Alexia Polillo, Brooke Fry, and Mary Mackeigan worked with CFICE as part of the Poverty Reduction hub‘s Phase I project on shifting societal attitudes towards people living in poverty.

In this article, the authors examine the attitudes that youth have towards individuals living in poverty in southwestern Ontario.

Abstract

Canada has been challenged in attempts to reduce and eliminate poverty. In this study, the authors used a projective technique to assess attitudes about people living in poverty (113 young adults, average age 21) living in southwestern Ontario. Five themes emerged from Thematic Apperception Test responses: (1) negative assumptions about people in poverty, (2) simplified beliefs about various pathways into poverty, (3) conditional compassion for those living in poverty, (4) gendered responses about women in poverty, and (5) individualized attitudes and beliefs about pathways out of poverty. Findings have implications for shifting victim-blaming explanations for why people are living in poverty.

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The research took place as part of the Active Neighbourhoods project running out of CFICE’s Environmental Sustainability hub in Phase I.

Abstract

This research evaluated a community-led participatory planning process that sought to involve citizens who are often marginalized within planning processes. Participatory planning – which is theoretically informed by communicative planning theory – may shift the legacy of power and marginalization within planning processes and improve planning outcomes, foster social cohesion, and enhance the quality of urban life. The two-year Stewart Street Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) project aimed to build capacity among residents of a low-income neighbourhood in Peterborough, Ontario and to influence City planning processes impacting the neighbourhood. The project, led by a community-based organization, GreenUP, fostered collaborative interactions between residents and planning experts and supported residents to build and leverage collective power within planning processes. The participatory planning approach applied in the Stewart Street ANC transformed – and at times unintentionally reproduced – inequitable power relations within the planning process. Importantly, we found that GreenUP was a vital power broker between marginalized residents and more formal power holders, and successfully supported residents to voice their collective visions within professionalized planning contexts.

KEY FINDINGS

• There is no single definition for food hubs.
• The different goals and objectives exist on a continuum that describes pathways to change, from enhancing food supply chains to challenging the negative outcomes of the dominant food system through social and ecological justice.
• The tensions that emerge between and within food hubs and the mainstream food system are often productive, helping food hubs to see new ways of being food hubs.

SOURCE DETAILS

Based on: “” in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, volume 8, issue 2 (summer 2018), advance online publication.

Date published: June 1, 2018

Lead Author: Charles Z. Levkoe

Co-authors: Colleen Hammelman, Luke Craven, Gavin Dandy, Jeff Farbman, James Harrison, and Phil Mount

Affiliations: Lakehead University (Levkoe), University of North Carolina Charlotte (Hammelman), The University of New South Wales (Craven), Everdale; The SEED Community Food Hub; University of Guelph; and Fleming College (Dandy), Wallace Center at Winrock International (Farbman), The Food Project (Harrison), and Wilfrid Laurier University (Mount)

Author contact: Charles Z. Levkoe: clevkoe@lakeheadu.ca

Keywords: Academic, Food Movements, Food Systems, Practitioner, Social Justice, Sustainability

Permanent link to abstract and full PDF:

Publisher: Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, Ithaca, New York

KEY LESSONS FROM THE ROUNDTABLE

Food hubs often struggle with complex logistics and accounting systems that can accommodate the diverse needs and capacities of suppliers and consumers and adapting these systems to their own needs. A commons-based peer production platform for hub technology could provide adaptable solutions that build on previous experiences shared by others—without having to repeat their mistakes.

There is a need to fund the social and community-based services provided by food hubs. A supply chain coordinator captures the many functions performed by those who facilitate food hub work. These functions, including matchmaker, educator, relationship-builder, policy thought-leader, and catalyst, are not easily reflected on a balance sheet. Investment in these functions will produce long-term economic and community development benefits. Academics and practitioners working together must find a way to clearly communicate the value of investment in the many functions performed by supply chain coordinators.

While research on food hubs has grown dramatically as the field has grown, many important areas for future research were identified during the roundtable. These included the need to better understand primary drivers for food hubs, food hub viability and scale, food safety, food hub responses to market signals, and the effects on community revitalization. Academics and practitioners can work together to convey the interconnected nature of these problems and solutions to policy-makers. Scholars can make valuable contributions to this work by facilitating connections and research.

Another critical area of further research centers around food systems as economic development. These include quantitative studies (e.g., exploring job creation, economic multipliers of a local food system, increases in farm viability) and qualitative measures relating both to the attractiveness of the area for non-geographically bound operations (e.g., technology) and to the impacts of a thriving local food system on quality of life.

STUDY BACKGROUND

This paper brings together the experiences of scholars and practitioners to share the results of sustained food hub research with the practical experiences of food hub operations and advocacy. The discussion presents a food hub continuum that describes different pathways to effect change, from enhancing food supply chains to challenging the negative outcomes of the dominant food system through a social and ecological justice approach. While the mission of particular food hubs may be aligned with one end of the continuum, they are often pulled in different directions by competing economic and social forces. This perspective problematizes typical descriptions by recognizing different goals and objectives as well as resulting opportunities, challenges, and innovations. While the authors do not suggest one end of the continuum is more important than the other, their analysis identifies a series of productive tensions that emerge. The discussion is structured around four central themes from the collaborative conversation: (1) descriptions of food hubs; (2) differing objectives; (3) navigating success; and (4) encountering barriers.

Bringing together the knowledge and experiences of scholars and practitioners can make an important contribution to understanding factors that contribute to a food hub’s impact. This paper, and the roundtable from which it emerged, bring these different perspectives into conversation to better understand ways in which academic research can contribute to addressing food hub challenges, in which practitioners can lend insights to gaps in the literature, and in which new avenues for academic-practitioner collaboration can be identified. This contribution is significant for bridging the overlapping conversation between scholarship and practice to ultimately better inform food hub development.

Abstract

Academic institutions and community-based organisations have increasingly recognised the value of working together to meet their different objectives and address common societal needs. In an effort to support the development and maintenance of these partnerships, a diversity of brokering initiatives has emerged. We broadly describe these initiatives as coordinating mechanisms that act as intermediaries with the aim of developing collaborative and sustainable partnerships that provide mutual benefit. A broker can be an individual or an organisation that helps connect and support relationships and shares knowledge. To date, there has been little scholarly discussion or analysis of the various elements of these initiatives that contribute to successful community-campus partnerships. In an effort to better understand where these features may align or diverge, we reviewed a sample of community-campus brokering initiatives across North America, Canada and the United Kingdom to identify their different roles and activities. From this review, we developed a framework to delineate characteristics of different brokering initiatives to better understand their contribution to successful partnerships. The framework is divided into two parts. The first part examines the different structural allegiances of the brokering initiative by identifying the affiliation and principle purpose, and who received the primary benefits. The second part considers the dimensions of brokering activities in respect of their level of engagement, platforms used, scale of activity, and area of focus. The intention of the community-campus engagement brokering framework is to provide an analytical tool for academics and community-based practitioners engaged in teaching and research partnerships. The categories describing the different structures and dimensions of the brokering initiative will encourage participants to think through the overall goals and objectives of the partnership and adapt the initiative accordingly.

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Dr. Charles Levkoe is a CFICE co-investigator as part of the CCE Brokering Working Group.

CFICE Co-Investigator, Charles Levkoe, recently published an academic article with colleagues Abigail Friendly and Amrita Daniere titled Community Service-Learning in Graduate Planning Education. Published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research January 2018, the article looks at how planning programs involving graduate-level students can examine learning outcomes to better describe the implications of community service-learning for graduate planning education.

Read through the abstract below, and access the full article through the .*

Abstract

Community service-learning (CSL) has gained popularity over the past decades in universities across North America. Although planning programs tend to involve more graduate-level community-engaged learning than other professional disciplines, learning outcomes have not been sufficiently examined. Based on a review of existing literature and analysis from four years of a CSL course at the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning, this article describes the implications of CSL for graduate planning education. We argue that CSL in graduate planning programs has a series of unique characteristics and thus requires distinctive pedagogical approaches.

*Note: Readers may need a subscription to the Journal or through an academic institution in order to access the full article.

To cite this article, please use:

Levkoe, C. Z., Friendly, A., & Daniere, A. (2018). Community Service-Learning in Graduate Planning Education. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 11(2), 0739456X1875431–12.

They have also been busily writing up the lessons learned from this work in a new journal article titled A people-centred approach to food policy making: Lessons from Canada’s People’s Food Policy project.  This article was published online by the  on December 17, 2017.

The paper reflects on a major public engagement process that was established to develop a Pan-Canadian food policy based on the principles of food sovereignty. The authors present an account of the People’s Food Policy (PFP) as a social and political experiment that mobilized a diversity of civil society networks and Indigenous people to establish transformative spaces and processes for (re)claiming control of the food system. They argue that the PFP process was a successful, yet imperfect model of a people-centred, counter-hegemonic policy-making process enacted through food movement networks that provided important lessons for advancing public participation in decision making and action.

Access the full PDF article by clicking on the image below!

Read the full article by clicking on the image below, or browse through the abstract for more information.

Abstract

Operating at the interface between ideas and action, graduate education in geography and planning has a responsibility to provide students with theoretical and practical training. This paper describes service-learning as a form of engaged pedagogy, exploring its ability to interrogate notions related to the “professional turn” and its contributions to transformative learning. Using a case study of a graduate-level service-learning course at the University of Toronto, we address the challenges associated with service-learning and highlight opportunities for students, faculty, universities, and community organizations. Our case study is based on assessment and analysis of the course and contributions to student learning, professional development, and community engagement. We contend that, at the graduate level, service-learning is an underutilized pedagogical tool. Service-learning can impart high-demand skills to graduate students by transforming how students learn and move from knowledge into ideas and ultimately action, and by offering opportunities for developing higher-order reasoning and critical thinking.